A search engine or search engine program is a widely used mechanism for allowing users to search vast numbers of documents for information. Automated search engines locate websites by matching terms from a user entered search query to an indexed corpus of web pages. A conventional network search engine, such as the Google™ search engine, returns a search result set in response to the search query submitted by the user. The search engine can perform the search based on conventional search methods. For example, one known method, described in an article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a document, such as a web page, based on the link structure of the web page. The search engine can rank or sort the individual articles or documents in the result set based on a variety of measures, such as, the number of times the search terms appear in the document and the number of documents that contain a link to a document. A search result set comprising a ranked list of documents with a link to each document can be returned to the user.
Publishers or authors of a document, such as a web page, can use a variety of techniques to manipulate the document to increase the ranking of the document by a search engine. With a high ranking, a user is more likely to click on the manipulated document from the search results.
Generally, a search engine attempts to provide the most relevant search results in response to a user's query. A user's search experience is degraded if the search results are not particularly relevant. The more information a search engine has about documents and search terms, the better determination it can make regarding the relevancy of the documents and thus, the better it can rank the documents.
Thus, a need exists to increase the accuracy of the ranking of documents in search results.